But everything seems to be speeding up," he said.
Dr. Kane's hypothesized breakthrough did not include an explanation for the so-called dark energy that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe.
Economic growth seems to be speeding up around the world, and inflation, which has been quiescent, might start to pick up.
Both teams found, while they were taking measurements of distant exploding stars in 1997, that the expansion of the universe seemed to be speeding up, but at first neither team believed it.
In West Antarctica, one of the three main outlets (which includes the glaciers behind Larsen B) seems to be speeding up, but another (the most volatile) may be slowing down.
Much of what we know about the universe — for example, the existence of dark matter, which seems to swaddle and shape the galaxies, and of dark energy, which seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe — comes from presuming that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time geometry — is correct over cosmic distances.
Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.
The Universe's Fate Bleak Implications Of 'Dark Energy' In 1998, two competing teams of astronomers startled the scientific world with the news that the expansion of the universe seemed to be speeding up under the influence of a mysterious antigravity that seems embedded in space itself and that is hauntingly reminiscent of Einstein's old, presumably discredited, cosmological constant.
Moreover, Higgs-like fields have been proposed as the source of an enormous burst of expansion, known as inflation, early in the universe, and, possibly, as the secret of the dark energy that now seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe.
